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Linux On Brazilian Voting Machines, the Video

Posted by kdawson on from the eat-your-heart-out-diebold dept.

Augusto writes "Just 10 days ago, 130M Brazilian voters were turned into users of one of the largest Linux deployments worldwide: the 400,000 electoral sections in all of the 5,563 Brazilian municipalities were running electronic voting machines, and the Linux kernel was running in all of them. These voting machines have been used in Brazil since 1996, and are rugged, self-contained, low-spec PCs. We've discussed the technical details of this Linux deployment and implementation elsewhere, but I thought it would be interesting to show some pictures (and a movie) of Linux booting on these voting machines. So I asked for official permission and thus was helped by a technician while I took some quick pictures and made a small movie showing the boot process, where you can actually read the kernel messages."

16 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Linux is great, but... by religious+freak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IT is great... Linux is great, but e-voting doesn't belong anywhere in major, general elections, IMHO.

    If you can code it, you can hack it. If you have coders or admins, you have potential security threats.

    --
    If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
    1. Re:Linux is great, but... by moderatorrater · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If it's coded properly, open sourced and widely scrutinized, electronic voting would be more resilient than pen and paper voting.

    2. Re:Linux is great, but... by Brigadier · · Score: 4, Interesting

      yea your right, what we need is a bunch of paper, marked in #2 pencil in a box. Yea that is much more secure. not everyone can hack an encrypted voting machine, everyone can steal a box and reprint voting forms.

    3. Re:Linux is great, but... by FlyingBishop · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My main question is who can modify the source of the software they're using, and how are they verifying that the binaries are unmodified. Generally, I agree that Linux doesn't belong there, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that any software used in voting machines must be open source.

      Here in the states, state law clearly defines how votes should be cast and counted. Without the source code to the program responsible for counting the votes, these laws will quite literally read something along the lines of:

      1.Voters enter votes into machines.
      2. ???
      3. Voters receive election results.

      The procedures for voting are a matter of public law. That must extend to procedures within the voting machines.

      If you think that's putting too large a technical burden on the lawmakers, look at building codes, patent law, etc. It's a little too late to call for law that is perfectly accessible to non-technical citizens.

    4. Re:Linux is great, but... by barzok · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, you need cards with little holes that get punched out to indicate your selections. Those work much better.

    5. Re:Linux is great, but... by Constantine+XVI · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's much easier to destroy or modify 10,000 votes on a flash disk without a trace then destroy or modify 10,000 paper ballots without a trace.

      --
      "I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
    6. Re:Linux is great, but... by amorsen · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Physical security is something we're really good at. Thousands of years of experience. That doesn't mean that there are no failures, but in general you can at least detect that tampering took place and that it was deliberate.

      With voting machines, you get a bunch of places where candidates happen to win by a 16384 vote margin -- is that deliberate tampering, machine error, or maybe just plain luck? You'll never know, and therefore you'll probably never catch the criminals.

      --
      Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
    7. Re:Linux is great, but... by MozeeToby · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If banks can transfer billions of dollars every day safely and securely (in many cases without even a paper trail), there is no reason why a decent electronic voting system can't be made. Compared to an ATM, a voting machine should be a piece of cake, you don't have to worry about verifying the user's identity. You don't need to check the balances and rights. All you need to do is accept and record the current user's vote, them reset for the next user.

      Do give us open source so there are 50,000 coders doing Q&A on it. Do give us a paper trail so that if there is any suspision then the vote can be verified. Do involve election officials in at least the requirements process.

      Don't give us a function that clears all votes made on the system so that polling officers can 'adjust' the vote. Don't give us hardware which uses the same exact key to unlock every case. Most important, Don't try to cover it up if you screw the pooch; let us know so the recount can be performed by hand.

    8. Re:Linux is great, but... by brazilian+brain · · Score: 5, Informative

      From TFA:

      All political parties have access to the source code, and digitally sign the executable code, and thus can confirm, at any individual machine, that the running software is the official one.

    9. Re:Linux is great, but... by buchner.johannes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      An election process has to provide the following characteristics (in some countries these are taken serious):

            1. Access: Only people allowed for voting may place their vote
            2. Equality: Each person may only be counted once and with the same weight of vote.
            3. Privacy: Noone can find out for whom a person voted.
            4. Secure against forgery:
                        1. Valid votes can not be changed/forged.
                        2. Valid votes may not be destroyed.
                        3. Invalid votes may not be added
            5. Checkable: Each voter has the possibility, independent from any other person, to check the correctness of an election including all previous points.
      ( I didn't find this in the English Wikipedia, this is a quick translation from the German Wikipedia )**.

      You cannot ensure these with voting machines without the use of paper*. It is not a matter of code, just a fact of information and physics.

      Use paper. Optionally with punchscan and the such. Even the cost factor is irrelevant. Democracy is worth it.

      ____
      *Maybe with quantum computers. But can the average person check the setup? With paper, you can.
      ** I'd be grateful for a link

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    10. Re:Linux is great, but... by Misch · · Score: 3, Informative

      Voter verified paper trail. IIRC, the machines in Brazil have one. In addition random hand recounts of precincts are needed as well.

      --

      --You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
    11. Re:Linux is great, but... by neuromanc3r · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If banks can transfer billions of dollars every day safely and securely (in many cases without even a paper trail), there is no reason why a decent electronic voting system can't be made.

      Wow, that's a pretty terrible non-sequitur. The requirements for banking and voting are completely different. An ATM does not have to make sure that you cannot prove to anybody what you did when you used it. It does not have to prevent other people from tracing any action back to you. And if something goes wrong or someone tampers with the machine, you will know it sooner or later and can complain to your bank.

  2. Free vote by Jabbrwokk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Free software for free votes, what a great match-up. Plus, it beats the Diebold machines running on Windows CE that kept crashing.

    Incidentally, I just voted in our Canadian federal election and we're still using the pencil-and-paper and human-counted voting method. Slower, but still the most reliable and secure method IMO.

    1. Re:Free vote by glwtta · · Score: 4, Funny

      I just voted in our Canadian federal election and we're still using the pencil-and-paper and human-counted voting method.

      Yeah, well, there's only like 47 people living in Canada - that makes things easier to do by hand.

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
  3. Re:I spy with my little eye... by socsoc · · Score: 4, Informative
    from TFA:

    The hardware is publically bought (in recent years, Diebold has been the main provider), but the software is developed in house by the Electoral Justice.

  4. Linux running on a brazillion voting machines? by DirtySouthAfrican · · Score: 4, Funny

    Certainly the Year of Linux!